


Averages

by trufflemores



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fluff, Meta, Romance, snuggles, speedster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 06:19:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13698603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trufflemores/pseuds/trufflemores
Summary: A speedster's ordinary is everyone else's extraordinary.Iris reflects on the numbers that define her everyday married life with Barry.





	Averages

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy! Don't worry, HOK fans: I'll update that fic as soon as I can, but I was inspired to write this piece, so, here you are! I hope you enjoy.

4:42 AM.

5:15. 3:28. 6:01. 7:07. 5:45. 8:32.

On average, Barry sleeps 96 minutes a night.

He hits the mattress at 2:45 and is up for a morning jog at 4:21. He slumps into bed at 6:09 and rolls out of the sheets at 7:45. He turns in early at 1:17 and is tapping away at the keyboard by 3:00 AM. He pulls an all-nighter and crashes at 10:15 the next morning, awakening refreshed and ready to go before noon.

That, Iris thinks, nursing a cup of coffee between her hands and yawning over five-and-a-half hours of sleep, is The Flash's real superpower.

* * *

10,489 calories.

12,565. 14,400. 7,890. 17,517. 22,950. 8,842.

Bare minimum, Barry needs 10,000 calories to stay clear of hypoglycemic territory.

Ten thousand calories a day fills fifteen full-sized meals. Instead of "breakfast, lunch, and dinner," Barry's meal schedule includes: pre-breakfast, main breakfast, post-breakfast, mid-morning, late-morning, pre-lunch, main lunch, post-lunch, mid-afternoon, late afternoon, early evening, pre-dinner, main dinner, post-dinner, and late-night tide-me-over.

In real time, he spends as few as 10 seconds per meal on busy days, amounting to just 2.5 real-time minutes on food. On slow days, he indulges in 5-minute meals, putting his grand total at 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Even on his slower days, he can consume fifteen meals in less time than it takes Iris to finish one with Linda.

It's even more impressive when she thinks about the Speed-time equivalencies. Although it's hard to say how much time passes in the frozen Speed Force state of things, Barry guestimates that it takes between 10 and 45 Speed-minutes to devour his meals. Multiplied over fifteen courses, it's a staggering 2.5 to 11.25-hour task.

Munching on Cheerios at the table while her speedster hub stands at the counter and finishes off another calorie-rich granola bar, Iris doesn't envy him and the 10-plus hours ahead of him, munching and crunching his way up to and past 10K.

* * *

102.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

103.1. 102.4. 101.9. 104.2. 102.5. 102.7.

Technically, Barry is always running a fever.

They don't call it a fever. It's his normal state, his resting state, a quirk of his heightened metabolism. He burns through calories like a furnace operating at full capacity, day-or-night. Even more impressively, he radiates palpable Speed-warmth within a three-foot radius; anyone standing within arm's reach can feel it. It's a soft warmth like sunshine through a window, drawing people closer to him.

Iris lives inside that circle, standing next to him on a chilly winter's eve or gently but firmly pushing him back when his sleepy koala cuddles turn into overwarm sauna snuggles. She enjoys taking advantage of his natural warmth in the colder months; she compensates with boy shorts and bras when it's hot out.

Nowadays, a fever for him approaches 112.0 degrees Fahrenheit, fluctuating wildly over the course of a single night: 107.9, 110.5, 109.4, 108.2, 105.6, 106.3. The first time one appears, it's the middle of the night and she barely understands why he's burning hot to the touch, stunned that he can even contract one. (Although, berating herself later, she'll wonder why she ever thought he  _couldn't_.)

Turns out speedsters' immune systems burn out everything that dares to attack them, be it the common cold or the Bubonic plague. Contrary to the team's original thought that speedsters might not get sick at all, they quickly found out that fevers and speedsters were almost synonymous during the heart of cold-and-flu season.

The best thing for speedster fevers is a good ol' forty-pound bag of ice and a tub.

It's no longer an uncommon sight for Iris to come home to Barry mostly submerged in an ice-bath, eyes meditatively closed while his speedster immune system short-circuits over a cold. The visible portion of his face is flushed bright red, and she knows he gets crushing headaches concurrently, but he still blinks up at her and smiles a little, like he's genuinely happy to see her.

Sitting on the floor with her back to the tub, eating cheesecake, she listens to him deliriously recite sonnets and smiles because she loves this sap she married.

* * *

Par.

Birdie. Par. Triple bogey. Bogey. Par. Ace.

Barry's pre-lightning and post-lightning putt-putt skills are identical.

Iris finds it endlessly amusing to watch the fastest man alive play mini-golf. Despite his extraordinary powers, on the course, he's just another amateur getting stuck in sand traps and teasing her to try and throw her off his game. Iris crushes him, but he keeps score honestly.

(Mostly honestly. He playfully puts a one in front of Cisco's scores just to get him to enter a spirited debate about morality and the integrity of Putt-Putt, but Barry still buys ice cream in the end, so all is forgiven.)

* * *

4,562 pages.

102\. 334. 72,648. 80. 1,500. 37.

Barry has checked out 958 books from the library since he became The Flash.

Their wi-fi is good, but it's not built to handle a speedster's speed. ( _I can read 480,000 words a minute. That's about 1,200 pages a minute. 20 pages a second._ ) He tears through paper books so quickly that friction fires are a real concern; flipping through the pages at super-speed can easily set the book on fire. In his six-year history as The Flash, he's incurred $48.06 in book replacement fees. After the fourth incident, Cisco gifts him with a pair of fire-tamping gloves to help prevent future ones.

Iris loves to read, but Barry truly devours books.

He also writes tens of thousands of notes to himself to help him remember the information that he reads about, aware that it will dissolve like smoke after about half an hour. He uses Speed-reading to pick up countless new skills in seconds, acquiring the know-how to fix leaky faucets and create new computer programs on a whim.

He builds a prototypal GIDEON program simply to compile his tens of thousands of notes, designing algorithms to sort the massive data inputs so he doesn't have to do so by hand. It's like an artificial brain, he tells her over coffee one night: the neural connections are the algorithms, the software itself is the grey matter.

Once he gets the program up to speed, reciting and storing information  _verbally_  at superspeed, his progress skyrockets. Then, like all breakthroughs, everything changes suddenly: a pastime becomes a game-changer. He comes home one night in an almost feverish state, babbling at superspeed because he can't contain himself over his findings.

"I think I just created a practical fusion-generating tokamak," he blurts out, and half of that sentence is nonsense to her, but he still patiently spends six chaotic hours explaining it, constantly calling up the GIDEON program to refresh a new train of thought. Iris doesn't even try to follow his verbal rampage – he talks too fast even when he's not completely blurring his sentences, and the little bits she catches are nonsense to her – but she's struck by how utterly enveloped he is by the thoughts.

Sometimes, The Flash is someone her husband becomes, a Speed-creature without a sense of real-time, rocketing towards the future so quickly that there is only a trail of lightning where he was.

* * *

900 beats per minute.

340\. 500. 830. 1000. 0. 450.

Barry's resting heart rate is a tachycardiac 400 beats per minute.

It surges to 900 in the middle of a hard fight and to nearly 2000 in a truly tachycardiac state before plunging back to its normal resting state. The change can happen gradually, in real-time, or abruptly, at speed. Thanks to the Speed Force, everything can happen fast for a speedster: in a crisis, they can catch their breath in real-time milliseconds in the heart of a battle to face their opponent again.

It's not without its costs. After one particularly lengthy duel with the Reverse Flash, Barry confided in her that renormalizing at superspeed was like getting the bends: it left him lightheaded and dizzy, with a bonus kicked-chest feeling to throw him off his game. It was still preferable to doubling over in the middle of a fight to heave for breath, but it generally made him moody and unhappy for hours afterward, trying to stabilize even after his fight-or-flight instinct had been switched back off.

The fastest heartbeat they ever properly recorded from him was 1,800 beats per minute. After cresting that peak, even Cisco's device stopped functioning properly. Later data analysis confirmed that he'd peaked around 2,200 bpm after he'd passed out, the equivalent of an ordinary human being experiencing a more-than-lethal 550 bpm.

Iris tries to imagine it, to fathom what it would feel like if her heart was beating  _eighteen hundred times_  per minute. It's out of conceptual reach. When Barry tells her "it's like … very fast  _nothing_ ," she believes him. Cisco asked if it hurt, and he couldn't find a proper descriptor – an ache, a throb, a stab, a twist, a sear – beyond "yes."

His heart beats very fast, but as long as it's still beating, they'll be okay.

* * *

10-29-05-48-95.

8-19-00-24-12. 01-17-30-41-20. 44-58-50-10-03. 04-52-76-29-02. 16-24-39-50-47. 26-94-13-42-56.

Often times, after Barry takes a jaunt into the future, he writes down the winning lottery numbers.

Occasionally Iris and he cash in, but only for partial wins, and only so they can donate the winnings to a variety of charities. They spend countless hours mulling over the possibilities, sometimes debating months in advance the pros and cons of each organization. Once the drawing date nears, they choose how closely they want to match the ticket to the winning number to increase or decrease their payload.

Even though the opportunity presents itself every time, they have yet to submit a perfect match. It's not technically illegal to use time travel to win the lottery, but it still seems taboo to rig the system so thoroughly. They know that it would also draw a lot of unwanted attention to themselves to win the lottery six times in a row.

Luckily, partial wins were far less reported and fewer eyes would watch them if they only pulled in a couple wins across more than half a decade.

In the span of six years, they anonymously donate more than $8.5 million to 75 different charitable organizations. It's the greatest unknown heist Central City has ever known.

(They  _do_ indulge in a $300 lotto-sponsored cheesecake-fest, but they reason that after saving the city at least as many times, they've earned it.)

* * *

131.

198\. 117. 145. 129. 175. 200.

Make no mistake: Barry may be a very  _good_ bowler, but he'll have to throw a lot more balls to top Iris' 210 average.

* * *

Sunday.

Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday.

It doesn't matter what state of disrepair they're in, whether there's a 40 or 50 percent chance of rain, two or three packages of Oreos left in their cabinet – as long as it's a day ending in  _y_ , Iris is still married to her best friend.

Sitting on his lap on their couch, watching another episode of  _The Bachelorette_ while silently debating the merits of getting up to fetch more of that sinful chocolate cake in the fridge, Iris rests her cheek on his shoulder for a moment and basks in the simple joy of knowing him and his wonderfully warm speedster hugs.


End file.
